Heroes, Frauds and Imposters

Among the 1.9 million who've fought in America's War on Terror, he was one of finest.

Rick Duncan had survived three tours of Iraq, dodged bullets and survived an exploding mine that flipped his armoured vehicle and killed four of his buddies. Captain Duncan had collected shrapnel he proudly declared to be 'internal body bling' and garnered some of the highest military medals possible. Back in the U.S the hero became an activist for the veterans' cause and as a decorated serviceman he was sought after, even starring in campaign ads endorsing an Air Force veteran turned would-be congressman.

His was a rollicking, triumphant story of sacrifice, dedication and heroism. And it was a lie.

Rick Duncan was a complete fraud.

And he's not alone. Far from it.

"I get overwhelmed with the amount of phonies, the verifications. It's overwhelming."

DON SHIPLEY FRAUD HUNTER & FORMER NAVY SEAL

Foreign Correspondent first met Rick Duncan on assignment covering the 2008 Presidential campaign. He was passionate about the plight of veterans, had assembled an outfit of other vets to lobby for improvements from Congressional hopefuls and he enthusiastically told hair-raising stories about his time in the battle field. His supporters and colleagues in the Colorado Veterans Alliance nodded along with his compelling rhetoric for a better deal.

Some others though began to doubt his stories.

"He would say little things that just didn't add up, but we dismissed it as his (war-time) traumatic brain injury. (But) We started to check out his story and in the process of about six hours we figured out he was a complete fraud."

DAN WARVI, COLORADO VETERAN

Foreign Correspondent's Mark Corcoran has returned from the United States with an explosive investigation of the boom in imposters. It reaches from the quietest, unsuspecting corners of America all the way to the highest corridors of power. Very senior and powerful political figures have been caught red-handed fudging even fabricating war service.

Corcoran rides with outraged former servicemen who've taken it upon themselves to expose the pretenders and shame the scammers.

Transcript

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CORCORAN: In a long war with few clear victories, America was desperate for heroes. Then along came Rick Duncan. Marine Corps captain. Three tours of Iraq. Silver Star for bravery, Purple Heart for wounds in combat.

RICK DUNCAN: "You know I'd spent a third of my life in the Marine Corps. It was everything that I knew, it was everything that I loved - everybody I loved was in the Marine Corps."

CORCORAN: A charismatic leader of veterans feted by politicians and the military. There was only one problem. Rick Duncan was a product of the on-line age.

DOUG STERNER: "We have a tendency to want those heroes and so when we meet them, we tend to quickly embrace them and not be dubious."

DAN WARVI: "It sounded real because it was real. He would take a portion of this story and a portion of this story and a portion of that story and craft it together."

CORCORAN: He was the virtual veteran. A complete fake.

[Walking past monuments] "Washington is a city full of memorials dedicated to the sacrifice of past conflicts. No doubt there'll soon be another memorial built here in honour of those soldiers who've lost their lives in the US declared "War on Terror". More than 1.9 million Americans have now served in and around Iraq and Afghanistan, but this story is not so much about this emerging group, but about the fakes and phonies who are now attempting to join their ranks."

Tonight on Foreign Correspondent America's new legion of liars - it's a phenomenon called Stolen Valour.

Since September 2001, this is how life's journey has ended for 5,700 young Americans - here at Arlington National cemetery, near Washington. Casualties in a conflict that doesn't discriminate between gender or faith. Jessica Ellis killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Corporal Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan a twenty year old Muslim. Etched under their names are the medals paid for with their lives.

Today, they bear the cremated remains of the latest casualty from Afghanistan. A grieving family receives the flag and medals from a grateful nation.

DOUG STERNER: "We're looking for a new generation heroes today and the one place to find them is those men and women that are over there sacrificing every day to do what most of us in American will never have to do."

CORCORAN: Doug Sterner is a military historian and Vietnam veteran. At Washington's Vietnam Memorial, he seeks out the name of a friend. When he discovered an imposter had lifted his comrade's identity, Stolen Valour suddenly became very personal.

DOUG STERNER: "Down at the very, very centre of that wall is the name of Jaime Pacheco of Hobbs in New Mexico. He was my closest friend. He was killed two months after I came home in May of 1972. He was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. I even ran into a case where a guy in California had actually stolen Jaime's Silver Star citation and put his own name on it. You know as I look around me I find myself automatically looking at someone and saying you know is that Silver Star he's wearing legitimate?"

CORCORAN: Doug Sterner didn't get mad, he got even, launching a cyber war to expose the fakes. But the imposters are now going viral. Since 9/11, the number of military phonies reported to the FBI has tripled.

DOUG STERNER: "Every week I get reports that 30 to 40 of which will turn out to be phoney veterans, phoney heroes, sometimes they're just claiming a couple of awards, sometimes they're running for political office - sometimes they're scamming the Veterans' Administration or others."

CORCORAN: In 2005 he helped draft Congress' Stolen Valour Act - imposing penalties of up to a year in jail for falsely claiming medals. Undeterred, the ranks of impersonators continue to grow.

"How many people have been prosecuted?"

DOUG STERNER: "The number right now is probably up to about 60 overall. For every prosecution there are hundreds of phonies out there that have never been touched."

CORCORAN: If Stolen Valour has a ground zero, it may well be here in Colorado Springs. This is the Republican Party heartland, dominated by the military, evangelical Christians and veterans. In 2008, Foreign Correspondent was in Colorado producing a report on the US Presidential election. This is where we met the talented Mr Duncan. He told of being a Marine Corps captain working in Washington at the Pentagon in September 2001.

RICK DUNCAN: [2008] "The defining day was September 11th, when the plane hit the Pentagon. We were on the opposite side of the Pentagon. I don't have nightmares about it anymore, but I did for a while and that is the defining moment of my life.... and it's.... it was horrific and I'll never forget it."

CORCORAN: Rick Duncan said he immediately volunteered for combat. His photo-shopped album documented his war in Iraq that came to an abrupt end when his armoured vehicle ran over a massive bomb.

RICK DUNCAN: "It took a thirty-five tonne Marine Corps Track and flipped it up into the air like a kids toy."

INTERVIEWER: "With you inside?"

RICK DUNCAN: "Yeah and there were eight people inside and four of them died that day and it left me pretty messed up with a partial cranial replacement, a fake hip, a finger blown off. I've got a couple of, I've got a fake, partial fake ribs and a couple of other you know pieces of metal left in me that we call 'internal body bling' so that's kind of funny".

CORCORAN: Rick Duncan established the Colorado Veterans Alliance. His powerful advocacy for veterans' rights soon attracted the support of military and political leaders. He even appeared in this campaign ad for a leading Democrat candidate.

(Campaign video)

Rick Duncan took us along to a workshop for soldiers about to deploy overseas. His opposition to the Iraq campaign made him the pin up boy of the anti war movement.

RICK DUNCAN: "Our service members have political and speech and constitutional rights that they don't give up when they take the oath to serve our country and we're letting them know that."

CORCORAN: But some were unsettled by their dynamic leader.

DAN WARVI: "There always was some suspicion among all of us. He would say little things that just didn't add up but we'd immediately dismiss it as his traumatic brain injury."

CORCORAN: Last year his comrades contacted the US Naval Academy - requesting a picture of Rick as a young cadet - only to be told they'd never heard of Captain Duncan.

DAN WARVI: "I sat down with another person that was involved with the Vet group and we just started, let's check out a story and in the process of about six hours, we'd figured out he was a complete fraud."

DAN WARVI: "That's when the power of the Internet came out. We Googled the name and that's when it started. That's when we discovered that someone named Rick Strandlof had tried to organise a Grand Prix race in Reno, held a fundraiser and then folded his tent and left. We found Rick Strandlof was protesting in the streets of California in 2004 supposedly when he was being blown up in Fallujah in the incident that gave him his injuries."

CORCORAN: The revelation detonated like a political hand grenade, but Rick Duncan appeared on CNN for one last performance.

ANDERSON COOPER: "You had said you served two and a half tours in Iraq with the Marines, in fact you were never a Marine, you were never in Iraq, correct?"

RICK DUNCAN: "This is correct Anderson."

ANDERSON COOPER: "And you claimed you were at the Pentagon on 9/11, you told a very dramatic story about being in the Pentagon on 9/11. You were never there."

RICK DUNCAN: "That is correct as well."

ANDERSON COOPER: "Where were you on 9/11?"

RICK DUNCAN: 'I was in San Jose California watching it in horror on TV with a few other people."

ANDERSON COOPER: "Were you incarcerated?"

RICK DUNCAN: "No, I was not at the time."

ANDERSON COOPER: "Were you in a hospital?"

RICK DUNCAN: "No, not a mental hospital. It was a homeless shelter."

ANDERSON COOPER: "Why did you tell all these lies?"

RICK DUNCAN: "Some severely undiagnosed mental illness, being caught up in the moment of an election and being surrounded by people who were passionate."

CORCORAN: Strandlof was arrested by the FBI and charged under the Stolen Valour Act. So how did he fool so many people for so long? The answer lies on line in the combat logs of American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

DAN WARVI: "Guys could go out on patrol during the day, come back to their FOBs at night, hop on the internet and blog about it to a lot of, probably frightening detail, stuff that probably shouldn't have gotten out. Rick lived on the Internet so he educated himself. He just fabricated a persona based on what he found on these blogs."

CORCORAN: "The internet has become the tool for the frauds."

DOUG STERNER: "Yeah."

CORCORAN: "And also it's what's enabled you to track them down?"

DOUG STERNER: "It is the internet that has revolutionised this."

CORCORAN: A few clicks and you create a virtual veteran with a false service record, complete with Purple Heart for combat wounds. A Purple Heart is the ticket to the front of the queue for free medical attention at Veterans' Hospitals. Where according to Doug Sterner, overworked staff have little time to verify the paperwork.

DOUG STERNER: "They do ask for the documentation but all this documentation is so easy to fabricate. We busted 8 guys in Seattle. These 8 men cost the VA $1.4 million dollars. Those benefits were paid out based on paperwork they provided showing all of them with combat decorations.

We've run across case after case after case after case like this and so it's very easy to see that it amounts into the tens of millions very easily so the fraud that goes on there is extensive."

CORCORAN: Far from Washington, in the pre dawn gloom of Virginia, another veteran rages his own gorilla campaign against Stolen Valour. Don Shipley served 24 years in the US Navy's elite Special Forces - the SEALS.

Now he runs private training courses, kind of a prep school, mainly for teenagers who want to try out for the SEALS.

Here they get a brutal realty check of what lies ahead on the SEALS selection course.

DON SHIPLEY: "This isn't a computer game - this for real. You know when I'm not running these courses, you know I get overwhelmed with the amount of phonies..... I get emailed.... the phone calls, the verifications and it's overwhelming."

CORCORAN: The fakes don't impersonate ordinary veterans. They want to be heroes, Special Forces and SEALS are top of the fantasy list. Don Shipley logs on to do a job the Pentagon refuses to do due to privacy provisions, providing instant verification.

DON SHIPLEY: "This is the database of every SEAL to date that has gotten through training."

CORCORAN: Often it's employers checking out the CV's of job applicants who claim to be ex SEALS. Don Shipley says 99% are frauds and are outed.

"What do you do about it?"

DON SHIPLEY: "The best thing we can do honestly with the age of the Internet, the pen is mightier than the sword is a real big thing. You know you just can't go around knocking people's teeth out anymore."

CORCORAN: Don's wife Diane also works in the business. Mounted on the wall is the Bronze Star for valour, awarded to their son who joined the SEALS and is still at war. Below the medal, an ammunition clip that stopped the bullet and saved his life.

DIANE SHIPLEY: "I can't look at that medal. It hangs on the wall, I've pointed it out to the students that come through the course. I have read that citation one time and that one time was enough for me."

CORCORAN: And staring out from the past, are the ghosts of fallen friends, SEALS killed in Afghanistan.

DIANE SHIPLEY: "The boys had just deployed and had been out of country for maybe three days and the very next week we went to a memorial service. Before the week was up, we had gone to two more. Then we went to where we lost you know the thirteen. Then it seemed like they just kept coming, and they kept coming and they got harder to attend.

I've had people ask me and look at me like, why the hell do you get so, you know, why do you care? You know why, so they're saying they're a SEAL and they're not, well this is why I care. I have been married for almost 29 years. I have spent.... up until retirement, I have spent four Christmases with my husband. And they want to claim that they have earned what my children have earned..... what I've earned - my husband, my son. I'm infuriated."

CORCORAN: It's not just low-level fraudsters inventing a heroic past. This year, two high profile politicians have been outed in their bid to court the growing veterans' lobby. Republican Congressman Mark Kirk is running for Barrack Obama's old Senate seat, but this former Navy Reserve Officer falsely claims he received an Intelligence Officer of the Year award.

MARK KIRK: "We misidentified it so when the staff saw that it was a different title, we changed my official biography."

RACHEL MADDOW: "Except it wasn't just on his official biography. Mark Kirk has also in person, out loud, congratulated himself on his fake Navy Intelligence Officer of the Year award in Congress."

MARK KIRK: [Congress footage] "I've been in the office just one year. Before that I was a Navy Reserve Intelligence Officer, was the Navy's Intelligence Officer of the Year in 1998."

RACHEL MADDOW: "No you weren't".

CORCORAN: And there's another Senate contender, Attorney General of Connecticut, Democrat Richard Blumenthal, falsely claiming to have fought in Vietnam as a Marine. Caught out, he chose not to apologise but clarify.

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: "I may have misspoken, I did misspeak on a few occasions out of hundreds that I have attended, whether events or ceremonies and I will not allow anyone to take a few of those misplaced words and impugn my record of service."

CORCORAN: Hartford, the state capital of Connecticut. We've come here in search of Mr Blumenthal who vanished from the political landscape after he misspoke. Also looking for him, a veterans group - right wing political activists who've got a problem with the flags flown over State buildings. They're also angered by the Attorney General's verbal gymnastics.

ACTIVIST VETERAN: "You don't make a mistake and say you served in Vietnam when you weren't there at all. That's my feeling towards the Stolen Valour. It's like wearing a medal that you didn't deserve. It's the same thing. It was just for his political gain and that's why he said it. And he said it multiple times, not just once."

CORCORAN: To everyone's surprise we're ushered inside for a boardroom meeting. Instead of Mr Blumenthal, we get his voice on a speakerphone. He explains he's out of town on family business. But this, his first interview since the outing, is brief.

"Attorney General my name is Mark Corcoran. I've just come up here with the group. I'm a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. How are you?"

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: "I'm fine but I'm not going to answer any questions from the press." [hangs up]

CORCORAN: However Connecticut's Assistant Attorney General has plenty to say. Richard Hine served as a lawyer in the Marine Corps Reserve.

RICHARD HINE: "Well he personally claimed to me he had served in Vietnam face to face."

CORCORAN: "And what in fact did he do?"

RICHARD HINE: "He was in the Reserves as a Sergeant. He was in a public affairs unit in Washington DC and it's my understanding that they collected toys for tots and they repaired playgrounds in the inner city.

He ought to resign as Attorney General - 'cause he is the chief, one of the chief law enforcements here in the State of Connecticut and he has no problem lying."

CORCORAN: But Richard Blumenthal and Mark Kirk appear destined for greater things. Both are still endorsed by their respective parties in the race for the Senate. Neither face Stolen Valour charges because they didn't specifically claim medals under false pretences.

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: (on air) We changed my official biography..... and I take full responsibility.

DOUG STERNER: "This is not a partisan thing. Phonies are not overwhelmingly Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans just like anything else."

CORCORAN: Doug Sterner is also heading to Congress on a lobbying mission. The US spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year on defence, yet incredibly, there's no central public database where claims of military service and medals can be quickly verified.

DOUG STERNER: "It's a scattered mishmash of records."

CORCORAN: It's a problem easily fixed.

DOUG STERNER: "We'd create a database that would list the names and citations of every man and woman who've received any US military award. The irony of it is other countries have this. The United States does not."

CORCORAN: Here along the corridors of power, Doug Sterner finds many open doors. Through one of them, Colorado Democrat Congressman John Salazar co-sponsor of the Stolen Valour Act. He supports the idea of a database, but there is a problem.

JOHN SALAZAR: "Well I think the biggest issue with this is of course privacy and a lot of people are concerned about the privacy issue of who can actually look up, you know, what a person's background is."

CORCORAN: "Is Mark Kirk, is Richard Blumenthal, are they fit to hold office?"

JOHN SALAZAR: "I for one would say that if someone actually lies about their past, they're not trustworthy to serve the public."

CORCORAN: Real Marines, with real medals, belting out one of the anti war anthems of the Vietnam era - without the faintest trace of irony. While many Americans question this war, there's a broad respect for the military bordering on veneration. Equally, Americans cherish their freedom of speech and it's this First Amendment right, enshrined in the Constitution that now threatens the Stolen Valour Act.

Recently, Rick Strandlof's case was thrown out by a Colorado Federal Judge on the grounds that it violated his freedom of speech. Last month, a Californian Appeals Court reached the same verdict on another Stolen Valour case. The rulings sent the commentariat into meltdown.

FOX NEWS: "Okay break out the fake medals and military honours for all you phoney heroes your day in the sun has finally arrived. A federal judge says a law prohibiting such behaviour is unconstitutional, so go ahead and lie."

DOUG STERNER: "There is some speech that you cannot engage in. You can't walk into an airport and yell 'hijack'. You can't go into a crowded theatre and yell 'fire'. You cannot engage in explosive hate speech towards an ethnic group or other minority. So the whole idea that we can say anything we want to under the Constitution, that's not true."

CORCORAN: Doug Sterner and Congressman Salazar now plan a Supreme Court challenge against the rulings.

DOUG STERNER: "What has been stolen is the credibility that we were really there. When someone says, well yes I was wounded in Iraq, do you think of that war that many men and women who have been wounded in Iraq or do you remember Rick Duncan who duped a whole community, a whole state and think, well I wonder if that man or that woman really was wounded in Iraq or is this just another Rick Duncan?"

CORCORAN: And as for Rick Duncan, the war hero who never was, well he's vanished into the white noise, the virtual reality of modern America.